Ha-Joon Chang Simply Quotations

Democracy, despite its limitations, is in the end the only way to ensure that policies do not simply benefit the privileged few.

Sometimes people with strong ideology, whether left-wing or right-wing, refuse to do something simply because they believe it is wrong, when doing it actually benefits them. For some people, it's not just about money and political power.

As someone from a developing country, I have a problem with rich countries thinking they can tell us anything, simply because they are giving money.

We need to accept that consumption is not the end goal of our life and stop measuring our well-being simply on the basis of earnings. We need to explicitly take the quality of our work-related life into account in judging our well-being.

If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown, we should simply ban complex financial instruments unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run.